James Azam, PhD
Faculty Observer Research Fellow
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine's Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases (CMMID)
About: James Azam is an infectious disease modeller and research software engineer. He is currently a Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine's Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases (CMMID), working on analysing the utility of wastewater surveillance for routine monitoring of several infectious diseases in South Africa and developing mathematical and statistical models for polio outbreak risk prediction and eradication across Africa. He was previously a Research Software Engineer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine with the Epiverse-TRACE Initiative, developing and maintaining R packages for reproducible analytics during epidemics. His PhD was in Applied Mathematics at the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis (SACEMA) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, where his research focused on outbreak response modelling and decision-making. He holds honorary positions as a Research Associate at SACEMA and a Senior Associate Research Fellow at the German-West African Centre for Global Health and Pandemic Prevention (G-WAC) at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana. James is passionate about outbreak response analytics, particularly developing reproducible methods and open-source software, science and policy communication, and infectious disease modelling capacity building in Africa.